difficulty of counting the homeless; the usual range used in public debate in the late 1980s was between 300,000 and three million persons (Answers, 1989, p. 45). Sossin (1996) estimated that, in New York City, the number of homeless persons increased by 350 percent in the 1980s (p. 635).
Many factors contributed to the rise of homelessness:
(1) The shortage of low-rent housing combined with a growing inequality of income and wealth. According to Sowell (1994), the overall problem was the "difficulty of building new housing sufficiently inexpensive to be afforded by very poor people" (p. 77). Time (1987) said that in the 1980s "the average rent grew twice as fast as the average income" (p. 45). The general prosperity of the post-war period had created a housing boom, principally targeted at those who could afford to purchase their own home or condominium or pay moderate to high rents. In the process, Magnet (1987) said that "cheap housing is being demolished, gentrified, or abandoned" (p. 170). High interest rates in the early 1980s and the collapse of the deregulated savings and loan industry curtailed the availability of financing for low-income housing construction (Savela, 1991, p. 309).
Rent controls discouraged new construction in poor areas of the cities. Incomes of the middle class stagnated in the 1980s, reducing its upward mobility to better housing and reducing the available supply of cheaper housing units. Particularly in short supply were single-room-occupancy units (SROs). Meanwhile, federal assistance to the poor generally and for public housing (cut 75 percent in the 1980s) and ? 8 rental vouchers/subsidies (authorized under the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974) declined as the Reagan administration scaled back expenditures to finance its defense buildup (Answers, 1990, p. 45). Johnson (1991) reported that, between 1979 and 1987, the income of average families in the poorest fifth of the popula...